The Comfort of Saturdays

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She looked around the table. The dinner party was in full swing and the noise level had risen as a series of animated conversations got under way. There was laughter, candlelight and the glint of silver.

  The doctor followed her gaze. Then he turned to her, his head inclined to allow for a discreet aside, although there was no danger of being overheard amidst the general hubbub. ‘Happy?’ he said. ‘Do you really think so? When I look round this table I can identify three cases of extreme unhappiness. Yes. Three.’

  Isabel said nothing, and the doctor continued, ‘That man at the end of the table there is married to that woman over there. I take it that you don’t know them? Well, he’s having an affair with some younger woman down in London. His wife is furious and, naturally enough, very unhappy about it. He’s unhappy because he can’t go to London and live with his mistress because he has a business up here in Scotland. And a family. Bleak, I’d say.

  ‘And then,’ he went on, ‘that poor woman on the other side of Colin . . .’

  Isabel glanced anxiously to her right. It occurred to her that the doctor had drunk too much wine and become disinhibited.

  ‘No, don’t worry,’ the doctor said. ‘Nobody can hear. She’s called Stella Moncrieff. And you may have noticed that she’s here by herself. She has a husband, though; they live in one of the flats down below. And right at this moment, I imagine, her husband is sitting down there by himself, thinking of what’s going on a few floors up.’

  ‘Why isn’t—’

  ‘Why isn’t he here?’ the doctor interrupted. ‘It’s shame. She goes out by herself. He’s too ashamed to go anywhere. Nobody sees him any more. Never shows up at the golf club – he used to play off a handicap of four. Never goes to the theatre, opera, what have you – nowhere. And all because the poor man’s ashamed of what he’s accused of doing.’ He paused and reached for his glass. ‘Although I, for one, take the view that he’s entirely innocent. He didn’t do it. But that doesn’t make things any better.’

  Isabel was about to ask what it was that he had done when the conversation suddenly shifted. Colin, who had been busy with his neighbour, turned to Isabel and asked her about the journal she edited. ‘Do many people read it?’ he asked.

  Pride made Isabel want to say that they did, but truthfulness intervened. ‘Not many,’ she said. ‘In fact, sometimes we publish papers that I suspect next to nobody reads.’

  ‘Then why publish them?’ asked the doctor.

  Isabel turned to him. ‘A simple utilitarian reason,’ she said evenly. ‘Because it adds to happiness. In a very small way, but it does.’ She paused. ‘And then, there are some conversations that may have very few participants, but which are worth having anyway.’

  The doctor stared at her for a moment, and then looked down at his plate. On the other side of the table, Jamie caught Isabel’s eye; his look flashed her a message, but she could not make out what it was. It might have been Help, but then it might equally have been What are we doing here? Of one thing, though, she was certain: it was not I’m enjoying myself.

  The doctor, looking up, witnessed the exchange, and threw a quick glance at Isabel.

  ‘That’s Jamie,’ whispered Isabel. ‘He’s here with me. And I can assure you that if he’s unhappy it’s a purely temporary condition.’

  2

  ‘Ramsay Garden,’ said Isabel.

  ‘Gardens,’ corrected Grace, her housekeeper. Grace was punctilious in all matters and would not hesitate to point out mistakes, whether made by her employer or by anybody else. She was particularly fond of correcting politicians, whose pronouncements she weighed with great care, searching for inconsistencies – and for half-truths – of which she said she found many.

  This time she was wrong. ‘Actually it’s Garden,’ said Isabel. ‘Singular. Probably because the houses were built up around a small garden.’

  Grace was glowering at her, but Isabel continued, ‘Mr Ramsay’s garden, no doubt. The poet, that is, not his son the painter. He had a house there, I understand. He came to Edinburgh as a wig-maker and did extremely well. Then he became a bookseller and his son became an artist.’

  Grace was tight-lipped. ‘I see.’

  They were in the kitchen of Isabel’s house, Grace having just arrived for work. She had found Isabel at the table, the Scotsman crossword in front of her, a cup of coffee beside it. Grace regarded crosswords as a form of addiction, to be handled with the same caution as alcohol, and in her eyes to do a crossword so early in the morning seemed akin to taking a glass of whisky with breakfast. And now, of course, there were sudokus, an even more dangerously addictive pursuit, although she had not seen Isabel stray over to them just yet.

  There was no sign of Charlie, apart, that is, from a small red fire engine and an already-battered stuffed bear propped up against the leg of a chair. His absence, though, was quite normal: Charlie was a child of habit, and he awoke every morning at five forty-five more or less exactly. Isabel would give him his breakfast and play with him for precisely two hours, at which point, with the same regularity with which Immanuel Kant took his daily walk in Königsberg, Charlie would begin to yawn. By the time Grace arrived he would be sound asleep, and would remain in that state until nine thirty, when he would wake with a hungry howl.

  Isabel had adjusted remarkably quickly to these early starts to the day. She reminded herself that there were parents whose day began much earlier. At the informal mothers and toddlers group that she attended at the coffee bar at the top of Morningside Road, there was a mother who was wakened each morning at three by a hyperactive son; she did not have to contend with that at least. And there was another respect in which she knew that she was inestimably privileged. She had Grace to help her with Charlie during the day, and Jamie, of course, to help her in the evenings. And when it came to babysitting, as it had the previous night, there was a sixteen-year-old girl further down the street who was always available and keen to earn a little pin money. Nobody else in the mothers and toddlers group was in that position, and so Isabel was discreet; Grace had never been mentioned in that company, although, if asked, Isabel would have admitted that she had help. Wealth, she thought, was something that should not be flaunted – even indirectly – but one should not lie.

  ‘And did you enjoy it?’ Grace asked, moving to the sink, where a few cups had accumulated.

  ‘Oh, it was the usual sort of dinner party,’ Isabel said. ‘A fair amount of gossip. Chit-chat. And we didn’t particularly enjoy it. In fact, Jamie didn’t enjoy it at all.’

  She looked at Grace, and found herself wondering whether the other woman ever had meals with friends. Grace lived by herself; there had been a man, some time ago, but he was never mentioned, and Isabel realised that she did not want to talk about him. Once, only once, had Grace mentioned him, and had been on the point of saying more, but tears had intervened and the subject was dropped. He had been unfaithful, Isabel assumed, or merely indifferent perhaps; hearts can be broken in so many different ways.

  Grace had friends, but Isabel was not sure whether they were the sort to meet one another for dinner; somehow she thought they were not. Many of these friends, although not all, were members of the spiritualist circle to which Grace belonged, and Isabel felt as if she knew them from the accounts which Grace gave of their meetings. The previous evening, for instance, when she and Jamie had been at the dinner in Ramsay Garden, Grace had been at a spiritualist meeting, and one of her friends, Georgina, had received a message.

  ‘I know that you have your doubts about it,’ Grace informed Isabel, as she began to load the dishwasher. ‘But there was a very good medium at the meeting last night. A man from Lerwick, a Shetlander. You don’t often get mediums from up north. It’s the first time, in fact, that we’ve had anybody from the Shetland Islands – or even from Orkney.’

  Isabel had heard about Georgina, who looked after an aged mother in Leith and whose husband had died on a North Sea oil platform. There had been an explosion, Grace had tol
d her, and Georgina had been left alone with her aged mother. It was the explosion, Isabel imagined, that had begun the path that led to the spiritualist meetings and the quest for a message from the other side. The other side – that was what Grace called it, although Isabel preferred the other shore, if one were to have an expression for a place whose existence was debatable. How crowded that shore must be, and how lost the wraiths upon it, jostling one another, waiting for some ghostly ferry; but she immediately reproached herself for the thought. If people needed to believe in the existence of another shore, then who was she to deny them that comfort? And Isabel had enough humility to recognise that there might come a time when she would take comfort in just such language and precisely such a notion. Perhaps that time had already come; if the miracle of Charlie had done anything for her, it had made her more convinced that a life without a spiritual dimension – whatever form that spiritual dimension took – was a shallow one. Not that this would ever induce her to await a message from one of Grace’s mediums . . .

  ‘And this man – this Shetlander – had a message for Georgina?’

  Grace nodded. ‘He did.’

  Isabel looked down at the crossword. A timely spirit? Zeitgeist, of course. Another coincidence.

  ‘What did he say? Anything specific?’

  When she replied, Grace’s tone was cagey. ‘He said quite a bit. There was somebody on the other side who had seen her husband. That was the message.’

  Isabel’s eyes widened. ‘Seen him? In the flesh?’ She could not help wondering: if the husband had died in an explosion, then what if . . . what if he was not all there? Or did the bits come back together again on the other side?

  Grace sighed. ‘The other side is part of the spirit world,’ she said. ‘I did tell you, you know. We don’t have the same form once we’ve crossed over.’

  Isabel wondered how people recognised one another if they did not have the same form. Or did knowledge in that dimension not depend on the senses? She wanted to ask Grace about this, but the words died on her lips. Her question would not sound serious, however careful she was in the framing of it, and Grace, who was sensitive on these matters, would take offence, would become taciturn. It was just too easy to poke fun at spiritualist beliefs; Madame Arcati and her blithe spirits never seemed far away, with their knocking once for yes and twice for no and all their Delphic predictions.

  She folded up her newspaper and rose to her feet. As editor, and now owner, of the Review of Applied Ethics, Isabel was free of the tyranny of office hours, but she was conscientious to a fault. She had worked out that the editing of the journal and all the correspondence this entailed took about thirty hours of her time each week. That did not amount to a full-time job, but it was close enough, and it did mean that if she took a day off she would notice it in the resulting build-up of work. So she stuck to a pattern of working for at least three hours every morning and two hours in the afternoon or evening. Of course there were weeks when she worked much more than that, particularly in the couple of weeks before the publication of an issue – the Review was a quarterly – when last-minute editing or proofreading issues inevitably arose. Then the button was eventually pushed and the Review went to print. Isabel liked the expression that newspaper journalists used: they put the paper to bed. It was a comfortable, maternal metaphor, she felt, and she imagined herself tucking a set of proofs under the sheets and kissing it goodnight. Children had that warm, freshly bathed bedtime smell; the Review would smell of ink, she thought, when she put it to bed.

  Grace turned round from the sink. ‘You’re working this morning?’

  ‘I have to,’ said Isabel. ‘I’ll take Charlie out this afternoon.’

  It was the usual arrangement. Grace had welcomed the arrival of Charlie just over sixteen months ago, and although they had never formalised things, she had expanded her job to include helping with him. This suited both of them very well. For Grace, it was the chance that she herself had never been given to play a part in bringing up a child, and the fact that she had become besotted with Charlie also helped. For Isabel, it meant not only that she could get on with her work, but also that the time she spent with Charlie was unaffected by the sheer exhaustion that a small child can visit upon his parents.

  ‘I’ll take him down to the canal,’ said Grace. ‘He loves the boats. Maybe he’ll become a sailor when he grows up.’

  Isabel frowned. Charlie would not be a sailor. He would be . . . Her frown turned into a smile. There were mothers, she assumed, who marked their children down for a career when they were still babes in arms, just as in the past they had promised children in marriage. Of course hardly anybody did that now, but we still worked hard enough to make sure that our children turned out reasonably like ourselves. We enrolled them in religions; we made them learn musical instruments we ourselves would have liked to play; we burdened them with family names. And here she was thinking that Charlie would not be a sailor, because being a sailor had not been on her agenda for him. But he might want to be a sailor . . .

  ‘Yes,’ said Isabel. ‘Perhaps he will be a sailor. Anything is possible.’

  ‘But not a soldier,’ said Grace.

  Isabel agreed. Charlie would never be a soldier. He would be far too gentle for that. He would be like his father, like Jamie. He would be musical. He would be gentle. Jamie could never point a rifle at anybody, she thought, even if they deserved it – as one’s enemies always did, of course.

  Then Grace muttered: ‘I was in love with a soldier once.’

  Isabel, on the point of leaving the room, stopped in her tracks; a soldier had never been mentioned before. She waited for Grace to say something more, but she did not, and continued with her work at the sink in silence.

  The morning post had arrived. Isabel collected it as she left the kitchen on her way to the study, scooping up the envelopes that the postman had stuffed through the front door. She could tell at a glance that there was nothing personal in the mail, and that just about everything was for the Review. She noticed a bill from the printer and a letter from Jim Childress at the University of Virginia; the remaining six items were manuscripts from prospective authors. These she would look at that morning and, if they were worth sending for peer review, she would dispatch them in the afternoon post. The rest would be returned to their authors, but only after a few days had elapsed; it would be rude to send them back the same day – authors looked at postmarks and were always ready to detect cavalier rejection. Of course, Isabel would not reject anything groundlessly; she read each paper and gave it the consideration it deserved. But even then, there were some papers that were just so amateurish or, in certain cases, so clearly the product of delusion or paranoia that there was no point in reading beyond the first page or two. She handled these carefully, since on more than one occasion the author of such a paper had become threatening, even if only from a distance.

  She went into her study and set the bundle of envelopes down on the table. There had been a run of fine weather and the morning was a warm one; even her study, on the wrong side of the house for the morning sun, seemed hotter than usual, and Isabel crossed the room to open a window. As the heavy Victorian casement slid upwards, the outside air rushed in, carrying the smell of freshly mown grass from the neighbouring garden, and perhaps the slightest trace of something else: flowering gorse, possibly, or blown roses.

  She stood in front of the open window for a moment, feeling the flow of air over her bare arms. Who was it who stood naked in front of an open window, even in winter, and took what he called his ‘air bath’? She had to search her memory for a good minute or so before the answer came: Lord Monboddo, the eighteenth-century judge and philosopher; he who, in his curious way, predicted Darwin, but was ridiculed for his insistence that men once had tails. She liked the idea of an air bath; she liked breezes and winds, she found them interesting. The winds must come from somewhere when they blow . . . The haunting line of Auden came back to her – WHA, of course. Yes, the winds c
ame from somewhere – but that was not the point of the observation; the point was there were mysteries that we could not solve, answers we could not give.

  She returned to her desk and to the task of dealing with the pile of mail. She extracted Jim Childress’s letter and read it first; it was a quirk of hers to read first those letters she looked forward to receiving, leaving the least welcome to last. Jamie had noticed this and suggested that she should do it the other way round, but Isabel had pointed out that irrational habits were exactly that – irrational.

  She read what Jim had to say. She had asked him to review a book, and he had agreed but had proposed a review article, which he said the book merited. Isabel would agree to that, of course. Then there was the bill from the printer – quickly dealt with – and after that, the manuscripts.

  The first two were unexceptional. A recent book had raised the issue of why the genetic enhancement of human beings was wrong and had argued that this was because human nature was a gift; one should not renegotiate a gift. The first paper took exception to this, arguing that there were other, more powerful reasons for not interfering in our genes. Isabel read the paper quickly and looked up at the ceiling. She felt uncomfortable at the thought of people enhancing themselves, becoming supermen and superwomen. But why? People educated themselves and went to the gym to do precisely that – to improve themselves intellectually and physically. If that was acceptable, then what was wrong with doing it through genetic engineering in the womb? Perhaps the answer lay in the motives of the people who would want to do that. They would do it to be better than the rest of us, to have an advantage. But any athlete, striving towards physical perfection, was motivated by exactly that; so it was all about selective egalitarianism, thought Isabel.